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Popular Culture Review
The bon-vivant role has the additional function of reinforcing the chef
adulators’ own role as consumers. This makes a lot of sense when one considers
how much Americans have dramatically stepped up this role in recent decades.
In Juliet B. Schor’s The Overspent American (1998), the economist tracks the
rise of spending and debt, noting that the average person’s spending increased
30 percent between 1979 and 1995. Meanwhile, savings rates have decreased.
Counter-intuitively, though significant in light of the population in question
here, the largest debt increases have been occurring among those relatively
comfortable households making between S50,000 and $100,000 a year. Of this
group, 63 percent had credit card debt as of Schor’s publication. Also as of
1998, she documents that the average household had been saving only 3.5
percent of their disposable income, a rate half that of fifteen years prior. Over
the year 1994-95, only 55 percent of households had done any saving at all.
Certainly, the consumption-friendly attitude of chef TV agrees with people.
The Reckoning
I wonder whether, on balance, the rise of chef appeal has been more of
a positive or a negative development. For chefs and prospective chefs, I imagine
it is a mixed blessing. It brings their profession the respect it deserves as much
as any other celebrity’s. At the same time, it fosters unrealistic expectations for
the majority’s success—there will be very few Iron Chefs, after all—and new
pressures to be media-friendly when it is enough of a job, and a noble enough
one, too, just to cook well. For the consumer, it is problematic in that much of
chef appeal is rooted in false pictures of food production and food producers. So
much of it, as well, is bom of consumers’ unprecedented detachment—from the
sources of their food and its processes of production. Yet, its ultimate effect
really depends on what consumers do with their, however mistakenly derived,
enthusiasm for chefs. Will they remain passive consumers, merely